Mission, Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie Vice-President, Research NATVAC University of Guelph

1. Mission, Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie Vice-President, Research NATVAC University of Guelph October 11, 2007

2. Mission and mandate • HEQCO is an independent agency with a mandate to conduct research and offer policy advice on all aspects of post-secondary education in Ontario • Review and Research Plan 2007 released in July, 2007 (available at www.heqco.ca) • Priority research areas • Accessibility • Learning quality • Accountability • System design

3. Structure and Budget • Council, chaired by Frank Iacobucci • President and CEO – Jim Downey • Research team • Vice-president • 3 research directors (2 in place, advertising for 3rd) • 2 research analysts (currently interviewing) • Support staff • Budget • $3 million, going to $5 million in steady state • Minimum 70% directly on research • Bulk of research activity to be conducted via external contracts • All research public; authors encouraged to submit to peer-reviewed venues

4. Our accessibility research aims to • Understand how PSE registration and persistence rates are related to • Students’ personal characteristics – financial and non-financial • Already considerable research and an emerging consensus • The pathways chosen – college then university, etc • Much less research and no emerging consensus • Recommend policy options that might improve the probability of success • Not even much research

5. What’s underway or planned • A multi-party, multi-year accessibility project covering the PSE participation life-cycle • Piecing together data from various national and provincial sources • Modeling students’ choices and testing hypotheses • Explaining inter-provincial differences in accessibility and persistence rates • Focus in particular on supply-side factors • Interventions (experiments) aimed at identifying effective policy instruments • E.g., replace loans with grants

6. Starting points for our learning quality research • Input measures suggest that Ontario’s learning quality compares poorly to that in other jurisdictions, and that it is has been in slow decline for several decades • Yet output measures suggest the opposite conclusion • We have very little direct evidence on learning quality in Ontario (or anywhere else for that matter) • But NSSE can perhaps serve as an instrumental variable for learning outcomes, making empirical testing and experimentation possible

7. What’s underway or planned • Examining variations in NSSE outcomes among Faculties and programs within institutions • Interventions at 9-10 universities in 2008/09 • Experiments with various learning methodologies/approaches • NSSE results as instrumental variable for learning outcomes • International, multi-disciplinary symposium on teaching and learning, Fall 2008 • Workshop on graduate and professional education for Spring, 2008 based on recent GPSS survey • Question: time for a Canadian DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice)?

8. Starting points for our accountability research • Accountability does not imply ranking! • There is considerable variation among Ontario institutions in how they assemble and use PIs for academic planning purposes • Challenge is to identify a set of performance indicators that • Disseminates information to students and other stakeholders • Supports differentiation in institutional missions and visions • Common University Data Ontario (CUDO) and the proposed Common University Data Canada (CUDC) are promising avenues • G-13 data exchange a model for more rigorous benchmarking?

9. What’s underway or planned • Workshop on university performance indicators (date: Nov 23) • Paper on a data architecture for a PSE quality framework • Paper on lessons for PSE from the health care sector • Papers on best quality assurance practices internationally and in other provinces • Analysis of Multi-Year Agreement (MYA) experience

10. Starting points for our system design research • Ignore the supply side at your peril! • Can the system accommodate all qualified PSE applicants? • Can it provide them with a quality learning experience? • How do we at the same time sustain and enhance research capacity? • What exactly do we mean by accommodating demand? • College or university • Geography • Institution • Program • Learning approaches • College/university transfers and collaborative programs a key feature of system design • View system design as a classic example of a principal-agent problem • Incentives, not coercion

11. What’s underway or planned • History of PSE sector in Ontario around general theme of challenges and responses • Multi-party, multi-year project on college-university pathways • Case studies of college-university programs • Paper and major conference on “PSE in Ontario: challenges and responses” • The GTA enrolment challenge